sakjur 2 months ago |

I’m fond of silos like the one the author unintentionally created. I’ve always felt like a forum that grows to a sufficient size will just end up being noisy and I’ll avoid getting involved. I’ve previously sought out Swedish-language silos which typically provide a smaller and to me more comfortable environment.

In a sense, I think it’s a sign of maturity for a project to outgrow “everyone active in this hangs out here” places.

The discoverability problem described is a problem with silos, and it seems like that’s an increasing issue to me. Fifteen years ago these silos were indexable by Google and searching for your problem might give you a forum post, an IRC-log, a blog post or documentation. Many of these communities were still readable by all. In that sense the silos of yesterday were more accessible than they are today.

tpdly 2 months ago | root | parent | next |

Totally agree. Commercial forums like Slack and Discord are winning for a reason-- they make for a really good experience. Invites, initial friction, feeling of a quiet and private room make a lot of conversation better than it could otherwise be. Maybe could export chats for archiving/discoverability. Probably need optional anonymization though.